79 quotes
The Zebra is striped all over so that the Lion can see him and eat him. Some people say he is striped so that the Lion can not see him. These people believe that the stripes of the Zebra simulate the bars of sunlight falling through the tall jungle grasses and that therefore the Zebra is invisible and that the earth is flat.
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)
Then Hamilcar … was drowned in 228 B.C. while crossing a stream with a herd of elephants.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950)
[Footnote] Great men seem to have only one purpose in life — getting into history. That may be all they are good for.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950)
I hear so many things about who I am supposed to be I hardly know what to believe. I am willing to tell all, but what Is it? Doubtless all these myths and legends will be straightened out eventually, but It may take years.
Catherine announced that he died of hemorrhoidal colic, and people who went to the funeral wondered why, in that case, the large bandage was tied around his neck. And that, gentle reader, is what comes from playing with dolls at the wrong time.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950)
After a while Louis let her [du Barry] draw her own drafts on the comptroller-general. It saved time and bother in a field he much disliked. Jeanne never took more than she needed for urgent current expenses — that is, whatever was in the treasury.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950)
The colonists, it seems, had to "pay taxes to which their consent had never been asked." Today we pay taxes but our consent has been asked, and we have told the government to go ahead and tax us all they want to. We like it.
[on the Borgias' illegitimate births] All children are natural, but some are more so than others and are therefore known as natural children.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950)
The Egyptians of the First Dynasty were already civilized in most respects. They had hieroglyphics, metal weapons for killing foreigners, numerous government officials, death, and taxes.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950)
[Footnote:] The Dotterel weighs only four ounces. It has long been a scientific riddle how so much wrong-headedness can manage to exist in so small a space. Still, there's the Least Gnatcatcher.
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)
During the Cretaceous Period many of the inland seas dried up, leaving the Plesiosaurs stranded without any fish. Just about that time Mother Nature scrapped the whole Age of Reptiles and called for a new deal. And you can see what she got. [Footnote: Here we see the working of another Law of Nature: No water, no fish.]
How to Become Extinct (1941)
Other countries may boast of this and that, but nobody can touch the United States for poisonous snakes. We have about twenty species, most of them deadly, and Europe has only five or six, none of them much good. We have fifteen kinds of Rattlesnakes alone and nobody else has even one. [Footnote: There is a species in Central and South America, but it probably came from here.]
How to Become Extinct (1941)
[Footnote:] An Ant on a hot stove-lid runs faster than an Ant on a cold one. Who wouldn't?
How to Attract the Wombat (1949)
[Footnote] It's easy to see the faults in people, I know; and it's harder to see the good. Especially when the good isn't there.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950)
Whenever a thousand or so of his men would fall off an Alp, he [Hannibal] would tell the rest to cheer up, the elephants were all right. If someone had given him a shove at the right moment, much painful history might have been avoided.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950)
Egypt has been called the Gift of the Nile. Once every year the river overflows its banks, depositing a layer of rich alluvial soil on the parched ground. Then it recedes and soon the whole countryside, as far as the eye can reach, is covered with Egyptologists.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950)
[Footnote] He [Alexander] was often extremely brutal to his captives, whom he sold into slavery, tortured to death, or forced to learn Greek.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950)
[Footnote:] Pliny the Elder perished in 79 A.D. when he refused to flee from the great eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, insisting that everything would be all right. It wasn't.
How to Attract the Wombat (1949)
I do not care for the big 'ideas' of novelists. Novels are wonderful, of course, but I prefer newspapers.
Attributed